Greater transparency at CIA would discourage risk-taking, Hayden claims

Surprise, surprise:

Outgoing CIA Director Michael Hayden is going around town telling folks he has warned President-elect Barack Obama "personally and forcefully" that if Obama authorizes an investigation into controversial activities like water boarding, "no one in Langley will ever take a risk again."

Imagine, for a moment, what might happen if there was a public investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency's operations.

I wonder if that would mean people like the Secretary of State would no longer privately fret about the United States having a double standard...

After all we have said about elections, if the first time a Communist wins, the U.S. tries to prevent the constitutional process from coming into play we will look very bad.

(Nixon Secretary of State William Rogers)

I wonder if an investigation would mean the CIA and ambassadors supposedly representing us would no longer claim that recipients of U.S. military aid - like Colombia - have few human rights problems.

Declassified U.S. documents show that the CIA and former U.S. ambassadors were fully aware, as far back as 1990, that the military in Colombia -- the third largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel and Egypt -- were committing extrajudicial killings as part of "death squad tactics."

[...]

When the killings became more and more widespread, the armed forces themselves asked the paramilitaries to hide the remains, to keep the country’s homicide rate from soaring any further, paramilitaries who took part in a demobilisation process negotiated with the right-wing Uribe administration have confessed.

I wonder if that would mean the CIA would no longer distribute "Freedom Fighter's Manuals" with instructions for extortion, blackmail, torture, murder, and political assassination.

What is to stop a group of people indoctrinated from not having a conscience? If it takes "investigations" into their activities in order for them to start to fear the "risk" of public outrage, then the world will be better for it.